Fort Leaton, which eventually encompassed forty rooms organized around two interior patios, is the largest adobe structure in Texas. The compound was not a military outpost but a fortified trading post, built where the Chihuahua Trail, the trade route between the Texan Gulf port of Indianola and Ciudad Chihuahua, opened in 1839, crossed the Rio Grande at a ford. By 1848 Doña Juana Pedraza and her companion, Ben Leaton, an American engaged in the Mexico trade, occupied this site, which she had acquired as a land grant in 1833. When Presidio County was established in 1850, Fort Leaton was designated the county seat. Following Leaton’s death in 1851, Juana Pedraza and her second husband, Edward Hall, did business here until losing the property in 1862 to merchant John Burgess. After 1881, rail lines through El Paso and Ciudad Juárez diverted trade from the Chihuahua Trail. The Burgess family ceased to live here in 1884 but owned the property until 1925. Aristeo Brito set his novel The Devil in Texas (1990) at Fort Leaton.
Fort Leaton was built on a shelf above the river’s flood plain, which affords a sweeping vista of Chihuahua. The compound measures approximately 200 by 140 feet, with its long side parallel to the river. The adobe walls are 18 inches thick. On the rear patio is a full-scale model of one of the ox carts used on the Chihuahua Trail, an open frame of timbers nearly 12 feet tall, with a wooden-slat cart bed resting on massive solid wheels of hewn timber more than 7 feet in diameter.
Presidio County began reconstruction of Fort Leaton in 1936 with support from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and historic preservationists from Marfa. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) recorded what remained of the deteriorated site in the 1930s. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department acquired the site in 1967. Archaeological research suggests that the compound was constructed in three phases and that the earliest did not predate the 1820s. Much of the present building is a reconstruction on historic foundations.